1. Technical Field
The invention relates to methods and systems for providing information in a content delivery system and, more specifically, to methods of providing information from a content provider through a portal to a user.
2. Description of Related Art
In known computer systems, the user may reside on a computer with a known browser and may be connected to the Internet. If the user requires information, it is possible to access a portal via the Internet and to request the desired information from the portal.
In known systems, the portal replicates all information which may be requested by users from the content providers and stores all that information in its own system. This storage tends to use a large amount of memory space within the portal. Once a content provider's information is stored at the portal, however, the content provider no longer has control of the provided information, because, for example, the portal may forward the information to another portal without the permission of the content provider.
If a user requests some information, the portal may combine sources of information from its stored content before sending the combined information to the requester.
When a portal replicates information from various content providers, the information is stored in the specific format of the information within the portal. This has the consequence that the portal needs to provide a content-specific application (also known as portlet) which is able to convert the required information from the specific format of the content provider into a format such as the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which may be displayed by the browser of the user. The conversion of the requested information leads to another effort which has to be carried out by the portal. Furthermore, this task is quite cumbersome, because the portal needs to be familiar with all formats of the information provided by the different content providers.
To solve this problem, content providers often create portlets and offer them to portals. However, this leads to the fact that the portal takes over software from the content providers which may include undesirable logic or data such as viruses or the like.
Another disadvantage of known systems is the fact that a portal typically has to pay fees in advance to content providers for the information they provide. If, then, the information is not requested by the portal's users, the portal does not recoup the fees it has paid because it receives little or no compensation from its users.
Therefore, a need exists for a method of operating a computer system that is capable of converting content in a desired format without using excessive memory space. A need also exists for systems and methods that provide content in a desired format while overcoming the drawbacks described above with respect to known methods and systems.